Austin Arensberg is the Business Development Manager for Prime Energy Investments, a private renewable energy investment fund. My primary responsibilities are to identify and screen potential investment opportunities across multiple countries in Southeast Asia and China.LinkedIn is one of my favorite tools to gain market knowledge and meet key industry contacts that lead to actionable investment opportunities. I particularly enjoy participating in discussions within groups, where I have learned about country-specific regulations, new promising implementations of clean energy technologies, and local conferences and events to expand networking opportunities.
Recently I wanted to learn more about companies building renewable energy power projects utilizing methane gas from landfills in China. At the time, I frankly knew little of that industry in China. Before I even began researching on Google and through relevant trade journals, I found and joined the Waste Management & Recycling Professionals group on Linkedin and posted a discussion asking for investment proposals. The response was tremendous and within a few hours I was speaking on the phone with various professionals each with over fifteen years of experience in the industry in China. While normally getting access to market experts takes significant time, LinkedIn’s groups offered me an invaluable yet comfortable medium for interested parties to quickly connect and share knowledge.
- Topics:
- LinkedIn Tips
Comments
Thanks for the great post. I am happy to hear that others are finding the use of linked-in groups to be very beneficial to connecting with people and sharing ideas!
Jim Horrell – jrhorrell@live.com
Though I am on Linkedin for some time now, I began participating in the groups very lately, and I realized that there is so much to learn out in the world, some discussions offer new insights to the areas of knowledge we think we already know. Specifically,I appreciate those who pass on the knowledge without any commercial interest.
Janaki
The challenge is managing the growing number of duplicative groups. For example there are more than six different general purpose groups for Pfizer employees to connect and even more for specific divisions and in some cases even product teams. Some groups are very active and helpful while others see very little member participation and you don’t know what you’ll get until you join.
I agree with both Janaki and Mark Andersons comments. Respectively:
* I have also found the groups to be rich in suggestions and tips that otherwise are hard to find and lack the interactivity afforded by LinkedIn.
* There are certainly alot of duplicate groups! I’m an Agile enthusiast and commenter but have decided to whittle my membership down to a single group just to control the volume of material coming in.
Groups are great!
Hi everyone.
My name is Victor Sekgothe. I live at Lyndhurst in Johannesburg. I have just joined the forum and I look forward to having fun with all of you.
Thank you sharing your Linkedin experience Austin.
I am just starting to learn the benefits of using networking and Linkedin as a marketing tool, so it was great to read about how you achieved results internationally.
As I wrote in my blog, Netting It Out (httP://nettingitout.com), a couple of weeks ago (http://nettingitout.com/2009/06/14/linkedin-needs-to-do-something-with-groups/), I think that there is a lot of opportunity for improvement in LinkedIn’s groups – perhaps even rearchitecting the structure and look-and-feel.
I follow 15 LinkedIn groups, and with one or two exceptions, the quality and quantity of the activity level in the groups is not nearly as robust or useful as they could be.
The groups I follow had (as of a couple of weeks ago) from 91 members to more than 12,000 members each, averaging more than 2,600 members per group.
The average number of discussions in these groups was (of a couple of weeks ago) well under 10% of the number of members. Where there are discussions in my groups, some 60-70% of the initiated discussions went without any response or comments. There is a reason for this.
The look-and-feel of LinkedIn’s groups could be much more appealing and compelling. With so many active messageboards and community forums on the Internet, I would not be disappointed to see LinkedIn to go something with the same look-and-feel that seems to be so much more successful elsewhere in the Internet.
The email digests that I get, too, could be much more appealing and useful. The digests seem to contain, most often, a series of one-off questions, with no grouping, order, or useful detail to them, thereby requiring me recipient to open each question or comment to determine whether it is a topic that I can and should try to add value to.
LinkedIn has gained considerable recent prominence as the businessperson’s social collaboration space of choice, and there is a lot to like about what LinkedIn has to offer. This is all the more reason that I hope that LinkedIn has something better in store for us soon where it pertains to LinkedIn Groups.
Thanks to @Robert and all for your comments.
I’ve forwarded this to our internal teams working on the product.
Mario from LinkedIn
Thanks for the spot-on post. Looking forward to more contributions.